'93 Freedom Riders May Help Dinkins

November 02, 1993|By Kenneth R. Clark, Tribune Staff Writer.

NEW YORK — The operation came off with almost military precision. The troops, bused in from hundreds of miles away, converged on a hotel near LaGuardia Airport. From that staging area cadres fanned out to the five boroughs. Their goal: To hit every housing project and congregational church in New York City's black neighborhoods before Tuesday's mayoral election.

"It was beautiful," said Gordon Mercier, a modern-day "freedom rider." "We went out in the community and told the people to get out and vote."

"We definitely made an impact," he said, as fired up as any college kid might be when his school's football team is ahead at halftime. "We're ready for a celebration."

Mercier, an undergraduate at Morris Brown College in Atlanta, was among about 200 students from Southern universities in nine states and the District of Columbia who rolled into New York last week in a geographic turnabout of the famed Freedom Riders from the 1960s. That wave of civil rights activists from the North to the South swelled into a tide, swamping the forces of segregation and helping to guarantee Southern blacks the right to vote.

Today's South-to-North effort, sponsored by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and including a handful of veteran civil rights activists, is billed as a non-partisan voter registration drive. But it couldn't have come at a better time for Mayor David Dinkins.

In the last election, voters in housing projects turned out in large numbers, but Dinkins won by a scant 2 percent margin.

Such voters now could tip the balance, especially because much of the Jewish bloc that helped elect Dinkins four years ago has apparently abandoned him after his handling of the Crown Heights riots.

He needs every African-American vote he can get, and the projects were the chief target of the new freedom riders.

Clad in bright yellow blazers emblazoned with the letters "NAACP," they traversed the city since last Wednesday, swarming through housing projects, rallying at churches, knocking on doors and urging people to get out and vote on Tuesday.

After hours of working some of New York's meanest streets Friday, they poured into the First Baptist Church of East Elmhurst, in Queens, to stage a pep rally-prayer service and have their first decent meal of the day.

Charles L. White Jr., the NCAAP's Atlanta youth field director, said the goal was to "learn to help people while we're young, so that as we grow it just comes naturally."

"These students most definitely are writing a page in history with this reverse freedom ride," White said. "All their names will be recorded in the history of the NAACP.

"So many have died for the right to vote. I think some folks have lost sight of that."

A spokesman for the Dinkins campaign downplayed the voter registration drive, insisting that, "because it is non-partisan, it could be argued that it could work for either candidate." The Giuliani camp isn't buying that.

"What all this shows is that the incumbent mayor has managed the city so badly that he needs to find enthusiasm for his campaign from outside the city," said Giuliani spokesman Richard Breyers. "It shows a very severe weakness in the mayor's base vote."

But Hazel Dukes, president of New York's NAACP state chapter and a veteran of marches through Selma and Montgomery, Ala., and Jackson, Miss., with Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., said the drive's primary targets are people disenfranchised by despair.

"Voter apathy has creeped back into our community," Dukes said. "The recession played a great part in this for our brothers and sisters who did not make it in the '70s like some of us did. They were not prepared for some of the opportunities, and the years of Reagan and Bush kind of wiped the opportunities out. . . . Our goal is just to get them to vote."

The new freedom riders, who visited several other cities on their way to New York, vowed to work its precincts through Election Day before returning home to catch up on schoolwork and then head to other towns to continue the voter registration drive.

Eloise Cannon remembers a time when almost none of them would have been in the colleges in which they are now enrolled.

Like Dukes, she staffed battle lines of the Deep South when civil rights demonstrators were met by water cannons, snarling dogs and threats of murder.

"This is a different era," Cannon said. "That was for civil rights, and we gained our civil rights. This is to get voters to go and get registered.

"Empowerment-that's what it's all about today. We're looking for empowerment. We're all fired up and ready to go."

Dukes agreed.

"There are no water hoses this time, and there are no dogs," she said. "But there is a new form of racism, and we've got to go on fighting it. Those who play (by voting) get included. Those who sit on the sidelines tend to be excluded."